brought
good cheer. The Government was well disposed. Trading and preaching
were to go on together, as planned. Joyfully then they built a
bigger and a better house, and called their colony Godthaab (Good
Hope).

The work was now fairly under way. Of the energy and the hardships
it entailed, even we in our day that have heard so much of Arctic
exploration can have but a faint conception. Shut in on the coast of
eternal ice and silence,--silence, save when in summer the Arctic
rivers were alive, and crash after crash announced that the glaciers
coming down from the inland mountains were "casting their calves,"
the great icebergs, upon the ocean,--the colonists counted the days
from the one when that year's ship was lost to sight till the
returning spring brought the next one, their only communication with
their far-off home. In summer the days were sometimes burning hot,
but the nights always bitterly cold. In winter, says Egede, hot
water spilled on the table froze as it ran, and the meat they cooked
was often frozen at the bone when set on the table. Summer and
winter Egede was on his travels between Sundays, sometimes in the
trader's boat, more often the only white man with one or two Eskimo
companions, seeking out the people. When night surprised him with no
native hut in sight, he pulled the boat on some desert shore and,
commending his soul to God, slept under it. Once he and his son
found an empty hut, and slept there in the darkness. Not until day
came again did they know that they had made their bed on the frozen
bodies of dead men who had once been the occupants of the house, and
had died they never knew how. Peril was everywhere. Again and again
his little craft was wrecked. Once the house blew down over their
heads in one of the dreadful winter storms that ravage those high
latitudes. Often he had to sit on the rail of his boat, and let his
numbed feet hang into the sea to restore feeling in them. On land he
sometimes waded waist-deep in snow, climbed mountains and slid down
into valleys, having but the haziest notion of where he would land.
At home his brave wife sat alone, praying for his safety and
listening to every sound that might herald his return. Tremble and
doubt they did, Egede owns, but they never flinched. Their work was
before them, and neither thought of turning back.

The Eskimos soon came to know that Egede was their friend. When his
boat entered a fjord where they were fishing, and his ro